The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Today, maps of geographic regions may be displayed by software applications running on a wide variety of devices, including mobile phones, car navigation systems, hand-held global positioning system (GPS) units, tablets, laptops, and other computers. Depending on the application and/or user preferences, maps may display topographical data, street data, urban transit information, traffic data, etc. Further, some applications display maps in an interactive mode, so that a user may operate various controls (radio buttons, scrollbars, etc.) to change the zoom level or pan the “camera” to a new location, for example. A user in some cases also may select or unselect the display of certain information. For example, the user may operate the appropriate control to turn on the display of bicycle trails.
In at least some vector mapping systems, the map data to be displayed is downloaded as tiles of vector data specified for a certain zoom level. The vector data is rendered using style information for the specified zoom level.